Which route do you take?
A - Fastest (14 min), Shortest (4.0 km), 30% green, 50% next to cars
B - Slowest (16 min), Longest (4.8 km), 5% green, 95% next to cars
Google Maps: Take B!
You can only explain this with google operating on "car-brain": Route B is taken by cars, has broad streets, so it must be best. Route A cannot be taken by car, so it must be bad.
@mszll It might be a small gradient difference and a factor related to the number of turns, the latter route has quite a lot (in their representation).
But in general yes their bike routes are not very good nowadays... in Sydney you sometimes get routed down Broadway because in Google's map it's a 'bike friendly road' - I think because bikes are allowed to ride in bus lanes.
I'm trying to switch to something OSM based but habits are hard to break.
@jroper yes most likely that plus the few m of smoothed cobblestone ("unpaved"). If so, it shows how bad street-logic based algorithms work for "weird" routes like bike paths that are decoupled from streets.